We returned to the ship that Balteeri had piloted so skillfully to carry us down to the secret city.
Of our journey back to the surface there is little to say, other than that it was terrifying. Though we were not pursued, Balteeri flew through such narrow passages, and at such an amazing speed, that I thought my death would come at any second. Finally he brought the vessel to rest in a small cavern. “All right,” he said, “from here on we walk.”
Making one of his mechanical parts glow, he led us into a series of winding passages.
We didn’t talk much along the way, partly because it was tiring work, at least for me, and partly because often we were walking single file, squeezing through narrow stone corridors. But Balteeri did say one thing that I could not get out of my mind.
“Serha Dombalt has more faith in the rulers of this planet than I do. I think our only hope lies with the people. They would demand action if they knew the truth.”
* * *
We emerged from a small cave onto the side of a steep hill overlooking the sea. The sun was just rising over the green water. An enormous gabill-fish broke the surface, its silver-blue body flashing in the morning light. The last and smallest of the twelve moons still lingered in the sky, but the Night of the Moondance was over. I was stumbling from exhaustion, which made sense, as I had gone the entire night with no sleep.
“Where are we?” I asked, trying to stifle a snarz-bizip.
“A half day’s walk north of the city,” said Balteeri. “Do you think you’ll be able to make it back all right?”
He looked nervous, and I realized that once he left us, he would have no way to force me to keep my promise. Nor, I realized, could he protect us. He wouldn’t even know if Derrvan and I made it to the city to deliver our message.
“We’ll be all right,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “I’ll do all I can. I promise.”
Balteeri nodded. Then he clasped my shoulders with three of his hands and said, “The lives of forty thousand beings are in your care.” He stared at me for a moment, his organic eye and his mechanical one both seeming to pierce right through me. Then he turned and disappeared back into the cave.
Derrvan and I started down the steep hillside. I longed to rest but didn’t dare. The final earthquake might not come for days, or even a full grinnug. But it might as easily come in the next hour, and I was terrified by the idea that taking time to rest could mean the difference between life and death for an entire city.
Yet we could not run the whole distance. Our bodies simply would not do it. Fortunately, I did not think that would be necessary. I expected to find a communication post well before we got back. Once I could call in, I knew we would be picked up very quickly.
Even so, we did run part of the way. When we stopped to walk, Derrvan told me about his life, how his mother—he had a direct mother, not a Motherly One—had taught him about his father’s work from the time he was old enough to listen.
“It was a strange secret to have,” he said. “I did not talk about it with friends.”
“Why not?”
He closed four of his six eyes. “Partly because it happened so long ago. My father died hundreds of grinnugs before I was born, you know, so the story was almost like a fairy tale to me. But the bigger reason I didn’t talk about it was that my friends all think of constructs as monsters. They have no idea of them other than what they have experienced in terror-ramas.” He paused, then added, “It has been my dream since I was little to redeem my father’s work.”
We had come to a road by this time. “Look!” I cried. “A comm-pole! Come on!”
We ran, stumbling and gasping, to the thick green-and-purple pole. I keyed in my code, got a connection, then keyed in the second code that would put me through to the embassy.
“Barvgis!” I cried when the connection was made and I saw his round face on the pole’s viewscreen. “It’s me, Pleskit!”
“Pleskit!” he shouted, and it made me feel good to hear the relief in his voice. “Where are you? Your Fatherly One has been frantic with fear!”
I gave him the locator numbers for the pole.
“We’ll have someone there soonest,” said Barvgis.
Since we needed to stay where we were in order to be picked up, I felt I could finally relax for a little while. Leaning against the comm-pole, I closed my eyes. The day was warm, the smells of Geembol Seven mostly sweet and pleasant. But I didn’t relax, of course. All I could think of was what I had to do, and how many people’s lives depended on it.
I don’t know how much time had gone by before Derrvan shook my arm and said, “Pleskit, they’re here!”
I leaped to my feet, which actually made Derrvan laugh. Three hovercars drifted to the ground in front of us. The tops of the cars lifted.
Each was piloted by a Geembolian Safety Officer. I watched as the driver of the first car climbed out, its stilt-like legs lifting the glistening, transparent cap of its body.
I was disappointed to see that the Fatherly One was not in any of the vehicles.
The Safety Officer seemed to understand the look on my face. “Your Fatherly One was at Safety Central, monitoring our search for you. Our patrol was much closer to this spot than he is, and when we got word where you were, we came directly here. Your parental unit will be waiting for you when we get back.”
I was mostly relieved by this information—though I was also nervous about how the Fatherly One was going to react to the story I had to tell.
* * *
As things worked out, I was not able to consult with the Fatherly One before matters came to a head. When we reached the city, we found a group of reporters clustered around the Safety Central media platform, all waiting to interview me.
An array of transmission and recording devices was ready and waiting to beam my words around the planet even as I spoke them.
I knew enough about the news media to realize that as the lost child of the off-world ambassador, I was a big story, a story that was probably being followed by hundreds of millions of beings who would be eager to hear what had happened to me.
And as I thought of that vast audience, I remembered Balteeri’s words in the tunnel: Our only hope lies with the people. They would demand action if they knew the truth.
With a thrill of terror and excitement I understood that when I stepped to the microphone, I would be speaking directly to the people.
No one would be expecting me to say anything controversial.
No censor would be on guard, waiting to pull the plug.
I was being handed a chance, a single golden chance, to tell the people themselves of the strange prison that existed inside their world, of the ancient wrong so foul that the memory of it cries to the stars.
All it would take was some courage, and the willingness to do something that I knew full well would likely destroy the Fatherly One’s mission on Geembol Seven.
What I did not take into account—could not take into account, because I had no way of understanding it—was the desperation of the construct hunters, the lengths to which they would go to keep their evil secret.
Derrvan stood to the side, between two of the Safety Officers. We both knew that in the minds of the reporters, I was the story. I would introduce him as soon as possible, but for now, it was all up to me.
I stepped to a speaking device.
“First things first,” said the Geembolian whom this group of reporters had selected to be their spokesbeing. “Are you all right?” Her internal organs, clearly visible through the transparent cap of her body, were moving sluggishly, a sign that she was relaxed.
(I have to stop to mention that this experience was utterly unlike it would have been on Earth, where the reporters would all have been shouting at the same time.)
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, to put them at ease.
“Thank the moons for that,” said the lead reporter. “Now, what, exactly, happened to you?”
“I w
as taken on a surprise tour of one of Geembol’s less-known scenic areas.” I chose my words carefully, for I feared that if I mentioned the constructs too quickly, I might be cut off—or, perhaps even worse, that people would stop listening before I could say what was truly important. “It was remarkable, a hidden wonder of your planet that is in danger of being destroyed.”
“How can that be?” asked the reporter. She sounded offended, and I noticed her organs were moving a bit faster now. “We guard our world most carefully.”
“This place is unknown to all save a few of your leaders,” I said. “And those few have worked tirelessly to keep it secret from you.”
An uneasy murmur rippled through the crowd of reporters. This was not a polite thing to say, and politeness is highly valued on Geembol Seven. I suspect some even thought I had gone crazy. Most, however, wanted to know what I was talking about.
I smiled. Arousing their curiosity had been my main goal.
It was a trick I had learned from the Fatherly One.
“I was taken to visit a city hidden deep beneath the surface of your planet. I have pictures of it.” I pulled out the card Serha Dombalt had given me.
“Who lives in this city?” asked the lead reporter, clearly startled by my claim.
“It is the home of—”
My words were cut off by Derrvan, who hurtled in from the side of the platform and flung himself against me, knocking me away from the microphone.
At the same moment an orange ray shot down from a nearby rooftop. It struck my side, slicing a wound that felt like fire. Had Derrvan not pushed me out of the way, it would have struck me full in the chest.
Alas, that was exactly what happened to him. I heard his scream, and the sizzle of his flesh even as I hit the platform.
Chaos erupted. The reporters were screaming and shouting. The Safety Officers, shaking their fringes in fury, closed protectively around us. Before they could block me in, I crawled to the edge of the platform. Thrusting Serha Dombalt’s image holder ahead of me, I passed it to the lead reporter.
“Show this to the world,” I pleaded. “To the people. Forty thousand lives depend on it.”
Clutching my wounded side, I crawled back to where Derrvan had fallen, pushing my way through the legs of the Safety Officers who were standing, ray guns ready, trying to spot the assassin.
At the center of the platform were other officers who had retracted their legs and settled the caps of their bodies close to the floor. They were clustered around Derrvan, their tentacles twitching in horror as they made a mournful keening sound.
No one was touching him.
He held out a hand to me. Ignoring the blazing pain in my side, I crawled to him, took his hand in mine.
“It was a construct hunter,” he whispered, squeezing my fingers. “I saw him on the roof across the street, just before he fired.” He coughed, and it was a horrible noise. Two of his eyes had closed. Another had filmed over and gone dim.
“I slipped the image holder to the lead reporter,” I said. “We got the word out, Derrvan. The people will know the truth.”
“I know,” he said.
Then he closed the rest of his eyes. His hand went limp.
I raised my face to the sky and added my voice to the wail of the Geembolians.
* * *
The lead reporter did her job well. Within an hour Serha Dombalt’s image holder was fed into the news networks. It wasn’t long before the entire planet knew not only the story of Construct City but also the way the construct hunters had tried to assassinate me to prevent the truth from coming out.
The government of Geembol Seven fell the next day.
The fury and disgust of the people was incredible. Oddly enough, one of the things they were most angry about was that the construct hunters had suspected where I was and had not spoken out during the time when my being missing had been the top story on the planet.
That was why a construct hunter had been waiting to assassinate me, of course: the hunters had linked my abduction with the chase that Balteeri had led them on. They didn’t know exactly what was happening when I came back, but they were pretty sure where I had been, and were afraid of what I might say.
The Safety Officers had not been guarding against any such thing, because they’d had no reason to expect it. After all, they hadn’t even known that the construct hunters existed.
Even though the fall of the government was not really my fault, the Trading Federation canceled the Fatherly One’s charter and pulled us from the planet. It is not considered appropriate for Traders to get involved in local politics, much less cause a revolution. And, as I was told several times, I had broken a major rule by making an end run around “proper channels” in order to take the story straight to the people.
* * *
Well, there you have it, Maktel. Now you can understand the reason why I have been so reluctant to talk about this. It brings up very painful memories.
Though the Fatherly One was greatly disturbed by what happened, he has also told me I did the right thing.
He even said I was a hero.
That is not true, of course. All I did was pass along a story.
The real hero was Derrvan.
I barely knew him, Maktel. Yet I cannot think of him without my clinkus tightening with pain. He saved my life, and in doing so lost his own.
But we also saved the constructs.
Forty thousand souls brought back from the brink of death.
That’s something, don’t you think?
Worth getting thrown off a planet for, if you ask me.
Your pal,
Pleskit
More from this Series
Too Many Aliens
Book 7
Snatched from Earth
Book 8
Sixth-Grade Alien
Book 1
I Shrank My Teacher
Book 2
More from the Author
Goblins in the Castle
Goblins on the Prowl
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
Bruce Coville has publis6shed more than one hundred books, including My Teacher Is an Alien; Into the Land of the Unicorns; and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. He is a frequent speaker at schools and conferences and has presented on five continents. He is also the founder and producing director of Full Cast Audio, an audiobook company that creates recordings of the best in children’s and young adult literature. He lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife, author and illustrator Katherine Coville. Visit him online at BruceCoville.com.
Glen Mullaly is an award-winning illustrator whose work can be found in books, magazines, greeting cards, and posters. He has also created puzzles and paper crafts for McDonald’s, and his Star Wars kids comics with legendary artist Ken Steacy have been released by Marvel Comics in graphic novel format. In addition to the Sixth-Grade Alien series, he also illustrated Bruce Coville’s My Teacher Is an Alien series. He lives on the West Coast with his wife and cat. Visit Glen at GlenMullaly.com and follow him on Facebook at glenmullalyillustration.
ALADDIN
Simon & Schuster, New York
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Bruce-Coville
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Glen-Mullaly
DON’T MISS THE REST OF THE SIXTH-GRADE ALIEN SERIES!
Sixth-Grade Alien
I Shrank My Teacher
Missing—One Brain!
Lunch Swap Disaster
Zombies of the Science Fair
Class Pet Catastrophe
Coming Soon: Too Many Aliens
A GLOSSARY OF ALIEN TERMS
Following are definitions for the alien words and phrases appearing for the first time in this book. Definitions of extraterrestrial words used in earlier volumes of Sixth-Grade Alien can be found in the book where they were first used.
For most words, we are only giving the spelling. In actual usage many would, of
course, be accompanied by smells and/or body sounds.
The number after a definition indicates the chapter where the word first appears.
DEEFRIM:
Slang term, shortened from deefrim ub
GERDIN POOZLIT:
To massage one’s forehead with one’s knuckles. This is a comfort activity for newly hatched Hevi-Hevians, not unlike thumb-sucking for Earthling infants. It is considered very inappropriate for anyone who has been out of the shell for more than a grinnug. (7)
GORKLE:
A state of solo reproductive readiness experienced by all seven species in Hevi-Hevi’s shape-shifting genus when they are forced to live in long-term isolation from others of their kind. Under the right circumstances a shape-shifter in gorkle undergoes a splitting process not unlike that of an amoeba. However, the work at the cellular level is much more sophisticated, and the body division is not equal, so that there is a definite parent-child relationship. (21)
KALYAP:
A vicious predator that lurks at the edge of the wampfields of Hevi-Hevi. Kalyappi (plural) are especially feared because of their tenacious grasp, which does not relax even when the creatures are killed. (12)
KIRGILTUM:
The internal organ where food is stored prior to digestion, often referred to by children as oodli skimbat (“my little pantry”); connected by the clinkus to the respiratory system. (7)
OOG-SLAMA:
(plural: oogle-slamini) The developmental organ expelled by a shape-shifter that has run a complete cycle of gorkle. A cross between an egg and a cocoon, oogle-slamini are considered special delicacies by the gourmets of Hevi-Hevi, though there has been a recent popular movement to discourage people from eating them. (21)
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